


Transmutation

by sigo



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Armageddon, Armitage Hux Has Feelings, Armitage Hux Needs A Hug, Armitage Hux Smokes, Blood, Blow Jobs, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Come Shot, Come Swallowing, Dubious Consent, Hand Jobs, Horror, Huxloween, Huxloween 2020, Idiots in Love, Injury, Kylo Ren in Love, Kylo Ren is a Mess, LITERAL seduction to the dark, M/M, Major Character Undeath, Melodrama, Movie: Messiah of Evil, Non-Consensual Knifeplay, Porn With Plot, Seduction to the Dark Side, The Whole Town's Got It TM, These bitches are STUPID, Vampires? Zombies? You decide, Walks On The Beach, but good luck getting him to admit it, just kidding its regular stabbing, the dark side works in mysterious ways including sending dreams of cute boys to you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:35:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27028951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sigo/pseuds/sigo
Summary: Hux drove into town and asked after Brendol at the first bar he came to. If old habits stayed true, his father would be a regular at more than one of them. The bartender gave him a surly look and said Brendol Hux had stopped coming in a month ago.“Owes somebody money, eh?”“Pardon me?” Hux asked, pausing. He had been about to leave.“You’re the second one in looking for him today.”Hux felt his face contort in surprise and willed it back neutral. “Who came first?”“Big fellow. Dark hair,” the bartender said, and then shook his head, looking troubled. “He said he was staying at the Seafront if I remembered anything. Just don’t bring him back here. Off with you.”
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 32
Kudos: 116
Collections: Huxloween 2020





	Transmutation

**Author's Note:**

> Please picture them in 70’s fall fashion for the love of god, I didn’t describe their clothing nearly enough. I also made a playlist to listen to while editing, in case anyone wants it. Voila:  
> [Transmutation](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6TtClw2HJ2RjGtbqA2k2Kv?si=o6BApJmsSq-aEj-7kh4KvA)  
> [Kylux Spotify Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6YRMYaT5fte0cPWH5UVGW5?si=J3LTK6tkRyqlKb_taM7eHg)
> 
> I think graphic depictions of violence and the tags cover any triggers here.

_They say that nightmares are dreams perverted. I’ve told them here that it wasn’t a nightmare, but they never listen. They nod and they make notes in my file, and they watch me. Waiting for me to cut myself with broken glass, to walk circles around the nurses’ station and bump my head against the wall, to eat insects during my time in the yard, or to urinate on the floor. None of them LISTEN, and they’ll pay with their lives. There’s so little time left._

_Not far from here, just outside Salem, there’s a school on the coast. A grouping of buildings, nondescript unless you know what to look for. It was more cult than school even before. Father billed it as an artist’s enclave. It was his attempt to continue teaching after being run out of London. It was called Arkanis, until the moon turned blood red. I know not what its residents call it now. I lived there when I was small, but it’s not my home. Nothing lives there now in those moldering houses, windows shuttered against the light of day. But what happened there, what they did to me...what they’re doing now…._

_They’re coming here._

_He’s coming HERE, the dark stranger’s war dog and his disciples. He’s waiting at the edge of the city, I can feel him in my mind like an ice cube pressed to the back of my neck. We couldn’t have married in life. Now I am his and he is mine, wedded in death. His followers peer around the buildings at night, and they’re waiting for his sign. They’re waiting for you. No one will help you._

Last diary entry of Armitage B. Hux, patient at Starbird Psychiatric Hospital of Boston. Reported missing from his locked room on October 31st.

  
  


Pavement rushed by under the wheels of Hux’s car, yellow-gray under the glare of his headlights. Arkanis lay ahead, his life behind. He was looking for his father. He’d left Brendol Hux at the old academy when he turned eighteen. The school was little more than a run-down bayside neighborhood of homes that Brendol had purchased and repaired well enough to house desperate aspiring artists. Some moved on. Those that stayed quickly fell under Brendol’s influence, and were no friends to Hux. Letters became Hux’s only contact with his father. Eventually they stopped. Hux didn’t think too much of it at first. He was busy. He was a career man, working hard in Boston — he made partner at the law firm last summer, two minutes after nine firefighters died in the Vendome collapse across the common. Hux’s relationship with Brendol had always been frosty, and he had figured until now that Brendol just gave up on his attempts to right the wrongs of Hux’s childhood.

Then one last missive arrived in the fall of 1973, deranged and cryptic in wording, and Hux could not go on without being sure of Brendol’s health, well or ill. He could not stand the lingering question of it.

 _I have little time now_ , Brendol’s last letter read. _I cannot write again, and you must promise not to look for me. It’s coming here to this beach, and I’ll wait here with the others. I must meet it. I’m already changing_.

Hux had a hearty sense of self-preservation, but he was no coward. So he was on his way back home, leaving September behind him in Boston. The winding drive up had been pleasant in the day, the trees already going orange and red. The twisted roads were less friendly after nightfall. Hux feared (and chastised himself for it) that he might turn a corner and suddenly come upon a ghoul standing in the road, washed-out in his headlights and reaching toward him. He stopped in Lynn for petrol, looking at the gleam of the artificial lights on the silver pumps in front of the automotive repair shop, and the reflection of red neon on the rainy asphalt. The forecast called for rain on the coast for the next week or so. It was drizzling now. The air was cool and smelled faintly of salt and sea-rot. Something was howling somewhere behind a wall of crumbling apartments in a scrubby copse of trees, the sound big and mournful. It made Hux’s skin prickle unpleasantly, instincts as old as humanity waking up.

“Dogs,” said the attendant, one hand on the revolver he wore on his hip and the other pumping petrol. “Stray dogs.”

“It doesn’t sound like dogs,” Hux said. It didn’t.

“Got to be,” the attendant dismissed him firmly. “What brings you around?”

“I’m visiting my father in Salem.”

The attendant turned to him, eyes wide and dark under the fluorescents. The embroidery on his chest said _Finn_. It matched the sign on the automotive shop, making this man the proprietor. His face was kind, genuine shock and concern creasing it that made Hux’s blood hum with anxiety. Hux stared him down and Finn realized how strangely rude he was being, and shrugged, rubbing a hand on the back of his neck. His hands were grease-stained from working on something inside the shop. Soon his neck was too.

“Sorry. I just can’t imagine why anyone would want to go to Salem right now. Tourist season, you know. Better if the old man came to you. Why...why don’t you go on back the way you came and tell your old man to come and see you? I know it’s forward of me….”

Hux grunted noncommittally. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Finn his presumption was all right, even to ease the tension. What right did he have to push into Hux’s business? None. Another car was coming down the lane, headed down the coast instead of up, and Finn’s entire demeanor changed. He was gripping his pistol very hard now, ready to draw it from its holster. Hux tried to hand him a card for the petrol and Finn hissed, “ _Get out_.” through his teeth, his jaw clenched. Hux did, leaving the nutty fellow alone with his gun and paranoia.

Midnight found Hux at his father’s home, an overlarge abomination with ornate gothic windows and a lookout tower on the backside facing the sea. The ocean roared just beyond it, a boiling black expanse in the cloudy night. It was angry -- a storm was coming. A mile down the beach, a fire blazed yellow.

 _Best go home,_ Hux thought at whoever was trying to drink on the beach tonight.

The white walls of the building looked blue, the ivy growing up them shadowed and fluttering with the tempo of Hux’s heart. All the windows were dark. He knocked on the front door and received no response, and so sidled around the porch, feeling cold salt spray on his face as he turned the corner. The crests of the waves were bone-white even in the gloom. Hux broke the window on the back door and let himself in.

“Father?” He called. His voice echoed, the uncertainty and burgeoning fear in it magnified by the house. It was nothing like he remembered. Arkanis might be a school of artists, but Brendol Hux had contained his work to proper canvas when Hux was young. Now, every wall was painted. Hux flipped on lights as he went, and found the illumination little comfort. Painted figures with hats drawn low over shadowed eyes lined the rooms, painstakingly mapped out and painted simplistically in monochrome palettes on top of pop-art oranges and blues. Black-and-white men wearing suits, staring from every wall.

There was a bed in the center of what had once been the living room, and an overstuffed armchair, and a record player. The three together made up the only furniture in the room now. A tray atop the bed contained a measure of whiskey in a glass. There were plants in every corner, green and verdant. Well cared-for.

Hux wandered the rooms, finding each one left subtly cluttered as though Brendol had only stepped out for a moment, but his father was nowhere to be found. And Hux found drawings. Sketches rendered with a skill that seemed leagues above what Hux remembered his father possessing. Pencilwork had always been Hux’s purview. Hux found expertly rendered drawings of the plants and the house and the beach, and places in town. The museum, shopfronts, statues. He picked up a sketchbook laying open on the dining table and leafed through it as he walked. Eventually the pictures gave way to hastily-penned words.

 _For three days now I haven’t slept. I don’t know how much longer I can go on. I’m seeing things, things coming from parts of my mind unknown to me. If it’s my mind at all_.

Another entry: _At night I wander the town alone. I catch glimpses of horrid things I know can’t be there, things in the shadowed alleyways. There are things on the beach when I return. Graying people with hungry eyes staring out at the water. They are not who they once were. I don’t make a sound, just in case, and I always bar the door. What are they waiting for? What am I waiting for?_

Hux checked the front door and found it barred from the inside. He taped up the broken window against the howling wind. Brendol didn’t return that night, and in the morning Hux pulled on a soft sweater and walked along the beach. Rain had given way to fog, illuminating everything softly gray. Kelp was going rust-red on the sand. He found the remnants of big fires, smoking black heaps of charcoal at even intervals. There had been more than one pyre the night before.

He drove into town and asked after Brendol at the first bar he came to. If old habits stayed true, his father would be a regular at more than one of them. The bartender gave him a surly look and said Brendol Hux had stopped coming in a month ago.

“Owes somebody money, eh?”

“Pardon me?” Hux asked, pausing. He had been about to leave.

“You’re the second one in looking for him today.”

Hux felt his face contort in surprise and willed it back neutral. “Who came first?”

“Big fellow. Dark hair,” the bartender said, and then shook his head, looking troubled. “He said he was staying at the Seafront if I remembered anything. Just don’t bring him back here. Off with you.”

The Seafront Motel wasn’t on the beach. Hux bypassed the office. There was only one room with a car in front of it, a cobbled-together monstrosity that looked like its engine would roar rather than purr. Hux knocked on the door and it swung open, unlatched.

The television was on, tuned to static. Hux walked in and found a man who certainly fit the description ‘big fellow’ lounging shirtless on the bed. He was chiseled, absurdly muscular and long-limbed. He must be a couple inches taller than Hux, and a few years younger. He had a large nose and full lips, and dark eyes. They held a quality that Hux couldn’t define, and that frightened him. Hux considered bolting out the door. Then, the man spoke. His voice was a low baritone that made gooseflesh rise on Hux’s arms.

“Have a seat.”

“No, thank you,” said Hux.

“I know your face. You’re too young to be the man I’m looking for, though.”

“What business do you have with my father?”

The man raised an eyebrow. “Your father. Interesting. I’m Ben Solo. You are…?”

“Hux.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Hux,” Ben said in a low sing-song.

“Don’t mock me,” Hux snapped, clenching his jaw shut afterwards. Ben looked like he could wipe the floor with Hux without breaking a sweat.

“Come in and close the door.”

“All I want to know is--”

“Close the door.”

Hux did, hearing it latch like the final nail pounded into a coffin’s lid. “I’m looking for my father,” Hux said, giving up any pretense of secrecy. “You know him?”

“I know of him,” Ben allowed, looking apologetic. “We didn’t meet. I contacted him looking to buy one of his paintings. The gallery wouldn’t sell it to me, they said Brendol Hux wanted to approve all transactions. As a matter of fact, it was a portrait of you.”

Hux felt the urge to pace, and dug his nails into his palms instead. “He didn’t meet you?”

“He didn’t. It’s a shame. I like to collect things. Particularly pretty ones.” Ben’s eyes gleamed. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, sitting up. Hux noticed the moles on his skin, like a reverse of a starry night sky. Ben’s stars were the only ones that would show here for the next week. More storms were in the forecast. “I’m sorry about your father.”

“What do you mean?” Ice stabbed into Hux’s stomach, twisting there.

“If I’m right, you’ll have to kill him. And you can’t bury him. You’ve got to burn him.”

“You’re crazy,” Hux snapped, and made for the door, his pulse jumping. He expected one of Ben’s huge hands to come down on his shoulder like a cartoon cop grabbing a crook. It didn’t. Hux sprinted to his car and drove halfway down the street before he remembered to breathe, taking in big weeping gasps.

He spent the afternoon in Salem proper, stopping by the art galleries and bars to ask about Brendol. Some of them were unseasonably closed. No one he met had seen or heard from Brendol in the last month, but plenty of them had heard from Ben. Hux found the portrait Ben had mentioned in one of the galleries. Brendol had patterned it off Hux’s headshot for the law firm -- Hux had sent him a copy, more to gloat than out of any fondness -- but the background was the beach by the house at night, the stars shining down silver onto Hux’s face. On the sand a pyre roared, throwing golden light up behind Hux like a holy crown.

When Hux returned home the sand and waves were pink with sunset. He showered and changed into pajamas, green flannel pants and a different sweater not stained with the memories of the day. A gray one. He flipped through the sketchbook, reading another entry. It was a diary, Hux realized.

_I wanted to call Tash today, but I picked up the phone and put it back down. He can’t hear me like this. My voice would terrify him. At times I make noises that aren’t human. I try to remember my past. My son. I can’t. Instead I think of death._

Hux slept in the bed in the living room, the waves rolling on the beach below the windows, a colorful crocheted blanket pulled snug over his body. Rain tapped at the glass. He woke, and the first thing he knew was that it was too early. It was perhaps not even morning in the strictest sense. There was a sound, a sort of high whine…. Hux bolted up in bed, thinking of his father’s cryptic words, thinking of a corpse scratching at the door and whistling rancid breath out of a hole in its throat. Or worse, a rotted hand punching through the taped-over window and turning the handle….

Hux got up and followed the sound, each step feeling like he had lead weights around his ankles. He approached the bathroom. Just as he reached out toward the door it slid open. Ben grinned at him, shutting off the blow dryer he’d been using. His black hair had twice the volume it had at the motel, freshly dried curls bouncing when he shook his head.

“What are you doing here?” Hux asked, practically snarling.

“I’m sorry,” Ben said, not looking sorry in the slightest. “I didn’t want to wake you. You’re cute when you sleep. Peaceful. You don’t look so starched.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“Just for the night,” Ben said, casting wide eyes at Hux and walking forward. He looked like a lost puppy. It was amazing how quickly his face could transform. “I’ll pay, if you want. I had some trouble at the motel. The police questioned me. I guess the townsfolk here didn’t take too kindly to me asking around for your dad. I was asked to check out early, and everywhere else switched on the _No Vacancy_ signs. How about that? You’re the only person I know here.”

Ben’s eyes cast around the room, taking it in in a distracted manner. He’d already observed it before, while Hux was unconscious. He picked up a paint knife from one of the shelves built into the wall, examining it, chipping at dried paint with a thumbnail.

“You didn’t get kicked out of a motel for asking questions,” Hux accused him.

Ben chuckled. “Mm. You’re clever, too. One of the bartenders turned up dead this evening in the alley behind his establishment. The police theorized it was dogs. The man was half-eaten. The Seafront still wanted me gone.”

The wind howled, sending a fresh battery of icy autumn rain against the window panes, the gale nearly drowning out the roar of the sea below. Hux looked out the nearest window, his head jerking toward it on instinct, as though it might shatter inward. There was a flicker of fire down on the beach, and that chilled his blood more than the storm.

“Stay,” he said, not sure whether he allowed it for Ben’s sake or his own.

Ben put down the paint knife and crawled into bed without another word, his face looking disgustingly smug. Hux almost tore his pillow and blanket free and stomped upstairs, but the second his hand closed on the faintly-scratchy crocheted yarn he lost the will to. The bed here was warm. The one upstairs was cold and unknown to him. Hux crawled in beside Ben, though he wrapped his blanket solely around himself and settled with his back to the man.

  
  


They took breakfast together. Ben cooked, scrambling eggs and flipping pancakes. “Father didn’t keep anything on hand but whiskey,” Hux said. The morning was brighter than yesterday, the sky the lightest feather-gray, but the rain still poured, pooling on the white wood railing of the porch and deepening the cracks in the paint.

“I bought groceries,” said Ben. “I wouldn’t recommend it.” He didn’t elaborate on that statement. He plated up two pancakes and a serving of eggs, drizzling hot sauce over the eggs without asking, and set the plate in front of Hux. Hux almost pushed it away. He had a mug of coffee and a cigarette. It was his usual breakfast. He attempted civility by taking a bite of pancake, and then half-finished them before he knew it. They were good, salty from butter and crisp on the outside, perfectly fluffy within. “Dad taught me,” Ben said, sitting across from Hux. “This was just about the only thing he could make, but he knew what he was doing.”

“Where is _your_ father?” Hux asked, taking another bite. “Your family?” Ben didn’t sound Bostonian. Of course, neither did Hux.

Ben frowned and didn’t answer, shoveling food into his mouth instead. Hux got up and poured another mug of coffee, putting it next to Ben’s plate hard enough for two drops to jump out and onto the table. Brendol had painted it like a blue sky at some point before Hux’s return, wispy clouds floating under their meal. Hux sat back down and picked up his cigarette, lightly tapping it above the carnival glass ashtray, staring at the iridescent sheen of it. Hux had the sudden desire to smash the ashtray. To throw it on the floor and watch the pink-peach pieces scatter. He swallowed the urge and chased it with smoke.

“What are you doing here?” He tried again.

This time, Ben finished chewing and drank deeply from his coffee mug with a nod of thanks, and then said, “I’m interested in a story. What was your father doing here?”

“He could paint, passibly,” Hux said flippantly, tapping his cigarette again. “He used it as a vehicle to ensnare people. That was his real talent.”

“But why here?” Ben pressed, sudden intensity in his face.

“It’s close to where we got off the boat. I don’t know,” Hux snapped at him.

“He collected people?”

“I suppose so. Yes.”

“Where are they now?”

“I haven’t checked the other houses.”

“Best not to. Tell me if you plan on it and we’ll go together,” Ben said. “This is good coffee. Thank you.”

Hux murmured _you’re welcome_. His mind was swimming, but not productively. The sort of swimming you’d do in a swamp, with horribly soft and clammy algae sucking at your limbs and no visibility beneath the green murk of the water. He felt as though he’d barely been keeping his head above the tide since the auto shop in Lynn.

“What’s going on here?” Hux asked suddenly, his voice a lot sharper than he’d intended, honed to a steel point by anxiety and frustration. “Why is everything so strange? You must know something.”

“There are legends in Salem. Most of them dead and done, and the rest fake. Save one. I’m here to collect it. It’s of a...personal interest to me. I think your father knew something about it.”

“He’s not here,” Hux said. _He’s not here so why don’t you get out. Why don’t we all just get out and never think of it again?_ But even in Hux’s own mind that seemed an impossibility. “I’ve asked in town. So have you. No one’s seen him.”

“He’ll come back. I can wait.”

Wait they did. Hux read a worn paperback he bought the day before at Maz Kanata’s shop, trying to get into her good graces before asking her about Brendol. He scarcely retained a word, occasionally bumping his reading glasses up on his nose when they slipped. Ben wandered the rooms of the old house just as Hux had done, making the same observations with different eyes. Hux wondered if Ben saw anything he’d missed, but couldn’t bring himself to ask.

At noon they drove around town in Ben’s calamity of a vehicle. Hux had been right that the engine roared. He decided that if they drove again they’d take his own car. It was sensible, and less conspicuous. There were few people on the streets, especially for October, but Ben’s car got a lot of stares. Hux didn’t like the feeling of eyes on him. Eyes peering through windows and out of shop doors, eyes in skulls attached to bodies walking the leaf-cluttered sidewalks, and they stopped walking when Ben drove by. They stopped walking to stand and stare. Hux thought there were eyes out of alleys, too.

When the sun started to dip low behind the clouds they returned home. Hux fixed dinner, rummaging around in the fridge to see what ingredients Ben had gotten. There was beef thawing, but Hux grabbed the dish and saw watery pink blood slosh in the bottom and couldn’t face it. He seared fish in a skillet instead.

After nightfall Ben beckoned him down to the beach. It was only drizzling. The wind promised that the storm would pick up. They saw fires on the sand and walked idly toward them. Slowly, sluggishly. Hux didn’t want to get too close, and dragged his feet. The air was brisk. Hux crossed his arms and then Ben threw an arm around him, pulling him close. Hux wanted to protest, but it was dark and cold out and even through their coats Ben was warm, and so Hux didn’t throw him off.

When they approached the first of the bonfires, Ben stopped. Hux looked up. He’d been watching his feet, finding the winking flames down the length of the beach too disconcerting to look at. Crowded around this closest fire were ten or twelve people in dark clothing. Hux thought they were wearing suits. Each and every one of them was standing completely still and looking out at the churning sea. Without a word to each other, Ben and Hux turned and walked back. Hux fought the urge to look behind him, worried in his core that if he did he would find the receding faces of the group turned toward him now instead of the sea.

Hux poured himself a glass of wine straightaway after he showered and dressed in pajamas, only returning to the living room once he’d drunk deeply from it. Ben had put on a record, something stuffy and classical.

“Hux, I need your help,” Ben said, turning toward him. He’d divested himself of his coat and boots and stood in black jeans and a shabby black sweater. His hair was still tousled from the sea wind.

“What?” Hux set his wineglass down on the coffee table he’d dragged in from another room and put at the end of the bed to pile his possessions under and on.

“My zipper’s stuck.” Ben grinned. Hux glared at him, and Ben laughed. “No, really. I can’t get it open. I don’t want to sleep in jeans.”

Ben could go and do just that, as far as Hux was concerned...but Hux abhorred outside germs in bed with him. He sighed and walked toward Ben. Ben met him halfway, holding up his sweater. His abdominal muscles were taut above the hem of his jeans. Hux reached out and undid the button, and then pulled the zipper down without fuss. Ben’s boxers were black. _What a surprise_. It wasn’t lost on Hux that the main attraction wasn’t the boxers but the hard length beneath them, straining under the weathered denim of Ben’s pants.

“I imagine you could have done that yourself,” Hux said drily, pulling his hands away. “Goodnight.”

Ben gripped his arms, holding him close. “You can’t just unzip me and say goodnight.”

“Can’t I?” Hux stared defiantly up their slight height difference.

“It’s rude.”

Hux felt his face heating, probably going embarrassingly pink. Who did Ben think he was, waltzing into Hux’s life and disrupting it so? “You’d prefer if I rolled over and spread my legs for you?” He spat.

“If that’s what _you_ prefer,” Ben said, his voice low. “Or we could do it the other way. Or try something more exotic, or do nothing at all. Those are the options, but no matter what you pick we’re smoking a blunt, and I’m going to kiss you. I’ll be back.” He left to shower.

Hux sat on the bed, fretting and downing his wine. He wasn’t a stranger to casual sex, under very specific and careful circumstances, but whatever he and Ben were doing defied orderly explanation. He heard the shower running and then the grating tinny whine of the hair dryer behind the closed door. What did he want? Hux thought of his barren and empty apartment back in Boston, no personal touches, barely lived-in. Hux wasn’t stupid enough to think that this was the start of whirlwind romance, even if he had been rather secretly charmed by Ben’s crude stunt with the zipper. Still...Hux was not one to object to a night with an exceptionally beautiful man, and if nothing else, Ben was that.

He downed his wineglass and went back to the kitchen for more, overpouring. When he returned, Ben was out of the shower. He wore a fresh pair of boxers, gray this time, but nothing else. He’d missed some beads of moisture between his shoulder blades, and they gleamed under the lights. Hux took another bracing swig of Shiraz, and approached. Ben’s hands were warm even through the thin knit of Hux’s cardigan and his shirt beneath.

“You look good in green,” Ben murmured.

“Don’t,” Hux said, fighting to quell the twitch in his expression.

“What?”

“Don’t say things to me for the hell of it while we do this.”

“I’m _not_ ,” Ben protested, squeezing. He reached for the glass. Hux let him have it, watching him drink and then set it aside, those plush lips purpled from the wine. “So,” Ben said. “What did you decide?”

The song changed on the record, to something Hux knew. It was less fussy, more sad. He’d always liked it. He put his hands on Ben’s shoulders. “Take my waist,” he said. Ben did. They swayed together, not attempting anything more.

“I might have guessed you’d need to be courted,” Ben said, his voice twisting on the last word in a poor imitation of an English accent.

“Do you object?”

“No. The sight of you inspires. You make me want to do battle with anything that would harm you. I feel almost knightly,” Ben said. Hux scoffed, turning his face to try and hide the flush he felt rising. Perhaps it could be explained away by the wine. Ben reached up with one hand, running it through Hux’s hair. Hux felt that his heart was about to beat out of his chest. “I like your hair loose like this. It looks like a heap of autumn leaves.”

“You turn into quite the poet when you want into someone’s pants.”

“I would offer you any prize,” said Ben. Hux laughed at him, the sound rusty from disuse, but genuine. Ben smiled, carrying on with dramatic nonsense as he suddenly pulled Hux into an extravagant waltz out of time with the music. “If my attention bored you I wouldn’t trouble you with it. I’d live with only the thought of you, serving you until my lonely death. Like a hound.”

“You wouldn’t. You never could,” Hux chided him, sure of it as soon as the words left his lips. Ben thrived on attention. He glowed now, with Hux’s eyes on him.

“You don’t think I could be the hero?”

“I don’t want you to. That’s not what I need, and not what you are, and I specifically requested no pretending between us.”

“Mm. You’re right. I’m not the knight, am I? I’m the monster.” Ben’s voice dipped deliciously low, making Hux shiver. There was loss in Ben’s eyes. That was the quality that Hux had struggled to recognize, and he thought himself foolish for that now. Was the same thing not echoed in his own? Each loss was different and yet the same. It clouded each person’s eyes the same way, like tossing a stone into a reflecting pool, marring the surface with ripples and darting shadows.

“Why do you want to kiss me?” Hux asked.

“Because you have green eyes,” Ben said, the teasing edge still in his voice.

“What else?”

“You have bloody hands.”

Hux didn’t dispute it. How many injuries had he inflicted on the people around him in the course of his life? Not physical ones, but deadly nonetheless. Soul-killing. “You would kiss someone with bloody hands?”

“It’s a requirement. I could only love an equal.”

“Don’t talk about love.”

“Does love make you swift or slow?” Ben asked, and abruptly twirled Hux around and pulled him in so that they were standing back to broad chest. Hux felt dizzy. It was partially alcohol. He didn’t answer, just letting himself lean back against Ben with closed eyes. He feared love made him slow. He couldn’t voice it. To be slow in this place, in this time, was to die. He knew that like he knew how to breathe.

“Kiss me. I’d rather you kiss me and get it over with,” Hux said, his heart battering his ribs like a bird trying to escape its cage. Ben twirled him back around and leaned in, pressing his lips so gently against Hux’s that Hux could have mistaken it for a dream. Hux deepened it, moving closer, adjusting the angle until he had Ben’s lower lip between his own. He sucked it softly and then nipped at it with his teeth. Ben snaked an arm around him and pressed them together until the constraints of physical form stopped him.

They pulled apart only long enough to look each other in the eyes, and then surged back together like surf breaking on a rocky shore. They kissed as if it were the condition for a stay of execution. The surface was bitter, dry wine. Beneath that, something intrinsically Hux melding with something intrinsically Ben. Ben’s tongue pushed into his mouth and it seemed to shift the very ground beneath them.

Hux thought about the howling he’d heard in Lynn, echoing between worn-down wooden homes sectioned into apartments with cheap carpet and peeling paint. He thought about the salt of each and every tear he’d shed in his youth just before yelling turned to a beating. He thought about the tinny, metallic taste of blood and the coppery smell of snow outside his window, of ice on the sea. He wondered whether he would live to see snow again. Or whether Ben would consume him first. Too late, he knew in his bones that this kiss had doomed him. He joined his breath to Ben’s and along with it whatever passed for his soul. Hux pushed Ben back, not to flee but to trap him as surely as he’d trapped Hux, and the room tilted. He realized belatedly that they’d fallen into bed together. Hux straddled him.

“Oh God,” Ben said, his voice rough, hips tilting up against Hux’s slight weight. “Oh God.”

It sounded like worship. There would be nothing casual in this, just as Hux had suspected. Hux’s cold heart ached for them both. His body ached in other ways. He shifted his weight to thrust himself against Ben’s thigh, his prick hard beneath his flannel trousers.

“ _Fuck_ ,” someone growled. Even days later, Hux could not place who. Desire swept them under black water.

_Ben’s a fool. This isn’t love. We only just met, and love doesn’t claim and take and ruin._

_Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?_

“Fuck,” Hux said, and this time he was sure it was him. Tears leaked from his eyes. They fell onto Ben’s face when Hux leaned over him to kiss the dimples at the corners of his mouth. Ben moved, trying for another real kiss, and Hux gave it to him.

“This suits you,” Ben said once Hux pulled away. “You don’t look so pinched.”

“Shut up,” Hux growled, and then decided to ensure it. He kissed down Ben’s neck, making the man’s breath hitch. Ben was beneath him, a storm above him. The room swam, orange and blue intermixed with stoic black-and-white attackers. The record player droned on, nasally piano melody a backdrop to the wind and rain picking up outside. The sheets felt rougher than usual beneath Hux’s palms, as if his nerves had only been sleeping all the years of his life and now they’d woken up.

Hux shucked Ben’s boxers down, moaning aloud at the sensation of the velvet cockhead under his fingertips. There was no going back now. It was possible that the ability to retreat had left the particles that would become Hux while they still swirled in the ether thousands of years ago, crashing into the stardust that would become Ben and not forgetting the taste. To Hux’s conscious mind, no choice remained. There was only the electricity of his flesh against Ben’s and every alternative a shadow cast aside. This was the destiny of things.

 _Is this enough? Can I stop after one night, and pack up and sneak out and go away, away from here and him?_ Hux asked himself, pulling back from the bruise he’d just sucked into the joining of Ben’s neck and shoulder, already aware of the answer.

“No,” Ben moaned, as if reading his mind. His fingers were solid in Hux’s hair, a broad ice-white hand weaved through fire. His other hand buried itself in Hux’s clothing, tearing his cardigan from his shoulders and rucking his shirt up. Ben ran pleasantly rough fingers over Hux’s nipples and then rested his palm over the racing life of his pulse. Hux fumbled his shirt and pants off, falling over onto the bed and righting himself, and Ben laughed at him. There was no cruelty in it. Ben lavished Hux’s thin chest with kisses, punctuating them with sharp bites. Bruising ones, and Hux bruised dark.

“Have you done something to me? You put something in my drink, or...or bought one of those sachets of herbs from a shop downtown only it -- ah -- it actually worked, _fucking hell_. You’re so lovely,” Hux muttered, sounding angry about it. He ran his hands over the muscled planes of Ben’s chest all the way down to the dark hair between his legs, studiously avoiding his leaking cock.

When their eyes met again they stared at each other uncomprehendingly. Hux had tasted lust, he had tasted hunger, but Ben lavished him with something more. He added to Hux, tattooing something to the empty canvas of his existence that rendered Hux’s previous life moot. Ben touched him as if he’d be asked to draw Hux from memory when they were done. One hand moved over his hip to squeeze his ass, the grip just short of painful. Hux gasped, and Ben stopped.

“Is this okay?” Ben asked, meaning both his palms on Hux’s skin and the exact measure of his soul rasping against Hux’s, tearing away microscopic bits that could not be replaced. The connection between them seemed at once perilously fragile and as solid as granite stone. For an instant, they wavered between destruction and creation. Hux tipped them over by sheer force of will, the very atmosphere between them changing.

“There’s no helping it,” said Hux, and rutted against Ben. The sudden too-dry friction of sensitive skin-on-skin held all the violence of a nuclear test and all the comfort of a worn quilt on a cold morning. He flicked a thumb over one of Ben’s nipples, watching the dusky flesh pebble up into a needy peak. He arrived at his decision. “I want to fuck you.”

“Fuck yes,” Ben said, with all the solemnity of a marriage vow. “In my jacket, if you could get it….”

Hux leaned over to grab Ben’s coat from the floor and pulled a little bottle from one of the pockets. “No condoms?”

“Was only planning on jacking off.”

Hux shook his head minutely, scowling more at himself than at Ben because he knew it wouldn’t change his plans, and then slicked his hand and pushed a finger in too fast. Ben hissed, his back arching. Hux worked quickly, fucking that finger into Ben until it was easy and then adding a second, stretching him. Ben was loud, moaning every time Hux brushed his prostate. Hux didn’t make a special effort to do so -- he wanted Ben to last. Three fingers should be enough. Hux twisted them and shoved them in harder, trying for another breathy gasp. Ben did him one better, whining.

“No diseases I should know about?”

“Christ, hurry up.”

“Hands and knees.”

“I want to see you.”

“You’re not my boyfriend. Turn over,” Hux ordered.

Ben grinned, challenging him. Hux yanked his fingers out and grabbed him, hauling him physically up. Once Hux started it, Ben went willingly, splaying himself out with his ass in the air and his face down on the sheets. Hux ran a hand idly over his balls and then up to his hole, fingering him again while he slicked his cock up. Ben gasped when Hux withdrew his fingers and pressed his cockhead against him, pushing back, trying to get Hux inside him. Hux sank in easily to the hilt in one fluid thrust that wrenched another whine from Ben. He was dizzyingly hot and tight.

Hux kept his thrusts slow at first, one hand on Ben’s hip and one splayed on his back, watching his muscles flex and the way he rubbed his face into the sheets, biting his lower lip. Hux moved his hand up Ben’s spine as he picked up the pace, fisting it in Ben’s dark hair. He tugged experimentally, and, when Ben didn’t object to that, jerked his head up savagely and used his other hand to slap his ass hard enough to leave an angry red handprint.

Ben yelped and then moaned, trying to spread his knees more, to let Hux have more of him. The windows shook in their frames, the glass gone opaque with rain rivulets. Hux felt the end catching up to him, thrusting savagely into Ben’s warm and willing body, hearing him grunt and moan beneath him every time Hux hit his prostate.

Hux's voice was tight, strained. “I’m going to--”

“Come in me,” Ben said, and Hux came with a grimace as if Ben had wrenched it out of him with the command. It was an unfamiliar sensation, spilling into someone without a barrier. Hux rocked himself deep inside Ben until he began to soften, and then pulled out, watching with horrified wonder as a white line of his own semen dripped down Ben’s perineum. Ben’s voice broke the spell. “I’m so close. Hux, please….” He was trembling. His cock was still thick and swollen, flushed red, clear precome dribbling from the tip down onto the sheets.

“You’ll need to move,” Hux tapped at Ben’s hip and Ben rolled onto his back, looking up at Hux with his pupils blown wide. Hux swirled his tongue over the leaking head of Ben’s prick and stroked him almost lazily. Ben keened, jumping as if he’d been electrocuted, shooting pearlescent ropes of come over Hux’s face.

“Sorry,” Ben said at once, panting. “I’m sorry.”

Hux clawed his thigh. “Sit up.” Ben did, shaking. “Clean up the mess you’ve made.” Ben’s tongue was slick and soft licking trails up Hux’s face. It was perhaps not any cleaner in the strictest sense, but the devotion with which Ben completed his task made Hux very glad he’d demanded it.

They lay together afterward, sweaty and spent. Ben seemed unable to go without touching Hux in some way for even a moment, running a palm over his stomach, pressing his knee against Hux’s leg, kissing his shoulder. It was needy. Hux allowed it, but couldn’t bring himself to return the affection. He felt like a man lying beneath the blade of a guillotine.

When they both came down from their high Ben moved them on to a different sort, lighting up the blunt he had promised. They passed it back and forth lazily. Hux pulled his cardigan and pants back on after wiping himself fairly clean with his discarded shirt. The room felt cold now that he wasn’t exerting himself. He pulled the cardigan closed. After awhile, Ben began to speak.

“My family’s as old as the hills. Mom delivered me herself. Dad was slow packing the Falcon and I was impatient, or so the story goes. She wanted to give me away to someone else. They had both planned on it, but once she was holding me Dad said, ‘he’s our boy, Leia’. That was how I came into the world. It wasn’t that she didn’t want me. She was afraid. I remember the red moon like I saw it myself. I think she does, too. I think it frightens her. My grandfather brought that horror to Tatooine. He died before I was born, but my Uncle Luke passed the story on. Mom gave him a bad look when he brought it up. He only did it once. He called it the blood moon. Luke said that was the night that he lost religion, when he learned who grandfather was. He learned there were men that could do horrible things. Like...like demons.”

Hux felt as though his bones were itching. “Do you want this back?”

Ben hummed an agreement, his broad palm warm through Hux’s sweater. Ben stroked his belly. It was strange, this intimacy. Hux didn’t usually cuddle his partners, even under better circumstances, when they weren’t babbling pulp horror froth in his ear. Wasn’t this strange? The thought flowed into and out of Hux as if his skull were leaking. He passed the blunt. Ben breathed deep.

Ben continued, “It moves in cycles. Now it’s happening here, but years ago in this little town on the west coast...Tatooine, like I said. Grandfather lived there. It’s a ghost town now. The moon turned red in the sky and people started doing strange things. People were bleeding from their eyes. Children ate raw meat. The town festered like an open sore until they...until the people came out of the canyon and--”

“Stop. Please.”

Mercifully, he did. Ben stubbed out the blunt in an ashtray and lay back down, gathering Hux in his arms. “I mean to see what there is in that story my grandfather told. It’s my blood. Do you understand?”

Hux nodded. The storm outside raged. Ben put out the lamp, and Hux clutched him in the dark. It was good to have a warm body rising and falling under his cheek while the sky screamed down on them. Hux lay awake a while, thinking. He suddenly dreaded the storms moving on and baring the eye of the moon. He prayed to find it unbloodied.

  
  


The streets of Salem were empty. It was strange to see the trees golden and leaves cascading down and no throngs of tourists snapping pictures and crowding into shops. Most of the shops seemed vacant, too. Closed down. Hux looked into the glass storefront of one as he drove by and saw people inside, dressed in their Sunday best and facing the walls, noses pressed to the wood paneling. He stopped looking in shops.

As if to spite Hux directly, by the time they finished breakfast the rain had slowed to an inconstant drizzle and the clouds had broken enough to let slivers of blue through. He’d spent the morning sketching, but when Ben went out to walk on the beach Hux couldn’t find another subject that held his interest. The pencil seemed heavier. When Ben stayed gone, Hux checked the pantry idly. Ben’s maddening half-statements and horrific allusions ate at him, and before he’d completely decided it he was in his car, going out to see the local grocery for himself.

The parking lot was small, and full. In fact, most of the parking spots in town were full. Where were all the people? Standing indoors with their faces pressed to walls? What a hobby. He parked down the street and walked. In the distance, there was a howl like the one he heard in Lynn. Something large scuttled away in the purple shadows of an alleyway when he walked by, upsetting a trash can with a hollow bang that made him jump. It was suddenly intolerable to be alone like this on a street that should be teeming with tourists, yellow leaves floating down around him and landing in undisturbed piles on the cement. The grocery store seemed miles away, his car even further. The sun came through a break in the clouds and was too hot through his sweater. Hux ducked into a coffee shop that had it’s OPEN sign glowing and the cool air inside refreshed him.

He went to the counter and rang the little bell there for service even though the last thing his nerves needed was overpriced caffeine. It was only that he wanted off of that desolate city street. He wanted normalcy. He rang the bell again, harder and more times than necessary, his pulse pounding. If a disgruntled barista appeared, annoyed with him and making grudging small talk, his heart would dislodge from his throat and slide back down where it belonged. But no one came.

Hux raised his hand to ring the bell again, opening his mouth to shout, and a sound came from the back of the store. A sort of wheezing, gasping cough and skittering movement just like the alley. Hux went back out of the shop and continued his walk. This was ridiculous. It wasn’t happening, none of it was possible. Ben had drugged him somehow, something funnier than a little dope.

 _Scary shit started happening before you met him_.

“Shut up,” Hux said aloud, quickening his pace. An antique store had every lamp on but the welcome sign on the door bent and hanging by one string. Hux tried the door to a kitschy joint with tarot cards stacked in the window and found it locked. When he turned back toward the grocery -- it was amazing somehow that it was closer, that the simple fact of walking toward a destination was unchanged when everything else was -- and watched a man in a navy suit stagger out of an alley. “Hey!” Hux called, jogging a couple steps toward him.

The man turned. He was short, olive-skinned and handsome with dark curls sort of like Ben’s. He looked at Hux blankly and then walked away in the same direction Hux was going, swaying and jerking toward the shadows of awnings whenever possible, shielding his face with a hand against the intermittent flares of direct sun. He was quick.

Hux walked after him, all the way to the grocery. The man walked in ahead of him and by the time Hux entered the store the fellow had disappeared into the aisles somewhere. The grocery store was brightly-lit, fluorescents humming, and fully-stocked. The fruit and vegetables looked fresh. Hux felt insane for even considering they wouldn’t be. There was a yellow sign sitting atop a stack of shiny red apples advertising the fact they were locally grown. The speakers played music, not the rotating pop track of a radio station but something instrumental and outdated with a bopping sax solo.

Hux’s steps echoed on the offwhite tile. He caught movement out of the corner of his eye and started toward the back of the store, looking down each aisle he passed. He paused with a small cry when he found the man he had chased here at the other end of one of the aisles, framed by a colorful array of chip bags, standing still and looking straight at him. The man’s expression was still blank, brown eyes glassy. After a moment the man walked on, not down the aisle toward Hux but past it. Hux followed, keeping to his respective side.

At the back of the store Hux turned the corner and halted again, his mouth coming open. For an instant his brain could not decipher what he was seeing, and then it clicked into place. The back of the store was the butcher’s section. The covered cases where the fresher, unpackaged meat was sold from were empty, but in front of the counter there was a long line of coolers stocked with plastic-covered raw meat of every sort. On the end of the bank of refrigerator units furthest from Hux, people crowded together. They pulled apart the plastic and dug in, bringing entire blocks of meat up to their faces and tearing in with their teeth or pulling stringy bits apart with their hands and lifting them up, pink and flaccid, to drop them into their eager mouths. Each and every person wore clothes fit for a wedding. Or a funeral.

Hux took a horrified, ragged breath, and as one every person in front of him stopped chewing. The man he had followed had only just ripped open a package of steaks, but he stopped too. They turned dead eyes on Hux. Hux heard a small sound, realized it was coming from him, and then turned and bolted. Formal shoes screeched on linoleum behind him, the people at the meat case giving up their dead meal in favor of live pursuit.

Cheery yellow walls and stacks of packages flashed by. Hux’s chest ached. He feared he was having a heart attack brought on by pure terror. He knocked over an end display of flower seed packages taking a corner too fast when he felt fingertips brush his shoulder. Other footsteps echoed now, the grocery store so full of the sounds of running that they almost covered up the saxophone hooting over the speakers.

Hux crashed into the door he’d come in and it shook in it’s metal frame but didn’t open. It was the sort that only opened one way. The exit was on the other side, past the check-out lanes. People with frozen faces sprinted toward him out of every aisle, some of them still holding or dropping ragged gnawed pieces of meat. Hux jumped the metal gate and sprinted down the windowed front of the store behind the cash registers, gunning for the exit. A man grabbed him, tackling him to the floor, and put a hand over his mouth when he started to scream. The hand was freezing. Hux writhed, kicking and clawing, and then he was free. The man had bloody eyes. Hux crawled forward and launched to his feet again, jumping another railing and slamming the exit door open with both hands. The sun greeted him, shining down directly through another hole in the cloudbank, warm on his hair and shoulders. He gasped for fresh autumn air. He didn’t stop running until he physically could not go on, jogging down the sidewalk.

There were no footsteps behind him, and he chanced a look back. No one had followed him out of the grocery store, though as he watched he saw one woman open the door and then jerk back inside as if stung. Hux returned to his car and drove home.

Ben waited on the bed, the record player shattered against one wall along with the record on it, one shelf torn down and paint tubes littering the floor. His face was in his hands. He looked up when Hux entered the room, his whole expression transformed in an instant from rage to peace and then to grudging shame and back to irritation. Hux hated him for that more than the mess.

“Hux, where have--”

Hux ignored him, walking out to check the bar on the front door and then all the way back to shove the kitchen table in front of the back door so that he could shower in peace. Ben tried to talk to him again after he emerged from the bathroom in a towel. Hux joined him on the bed but pointedly shouldered him out of the way to grab a sketchbook.

“Hux--”

“Shut your mouth,” Hux snapped, and Ben did, though he insisted on half-smothering Hux, limbs squeezing him and face resting on his chest while Hux read his father’s haphazard diary.

 _I dread the night now. The fires on the beach are more numerous. And more of THEM are coming out now at night from the town. I sat on the back porch today with a man who wasn’t real. He couldn’t be, for he materialized out of thin air and left much the same way, and he didn’t speak aloud. He was young and there was a scar on his face, by his right eye. My ears heard only the waves, but my mind heard the man speak. He told me a story about a town in California. A dark stranger arrived there, and monstrous things happened to people when he came. I thought I was going mad then, but it’s worse now. I think that the hideous things I’ve been seeing are not imaginary_.

Hux shoved Ben off roughly, ignoring his wide puppy-eyes, and went upstairs nude into his father’s bedroom and tried the radio, and none of the local stations came in. He kept turning the dial, and eventually one crackled to life, the voice full of static.

\-- _Radio 66, the voice of Tatooine_ \-- Hux shut the radio off so urgently he toppled it from the table, and returned downstairs on legs he didn’t feel. The sky darkened and the first of the fires lit up out the windows.

Ben waited still in bed, and now took one look at Hux’s face and couldn’t keep himself from speaking up again. “What’s wrong?” His eyes flicked around the room, cluttered with debris. “I’m sorry about the mess. I really am. I just...I got home and your car was gone, and I--”

“My father used to tell me that you were close to waking when you dreamed you were dreaming,” Hux said. The air was chilly on his naked skin, and he crawled back into bed, Ben enfolding him into his arms. “I’m cold. Hand me my robe.”

Ben did. As Hux knotted it closed around his waist, Ben asked, “Where did you go?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Hux said, eyeing him.

Ben sucked him off before they slept, Hux’s pleated white robe pulled open just enough to bare his cock and ginger pubic hair and a triangle of thigh that Ben left bite marks on. Hux thought that even if he lived to be ninety he would never forget the way Ben’s lips and mouth felt on his skin, and Hux was increasingly sure that old age was not in the cards for him. Hux let Ben rut against him from behind through his robe, panting in his ear, but it went on too long and Hux admitted defeat, reaching back and stroking Ben with his hand until Ben shuddered and came so that they could both get some rest.

Sometime before morning, Hux woke again. The light in the studio room next to their makeshift bedroom had clicked on, but Ben was still warm in bed next to him. Hux got up, drawing his robe tighter around him as he walked into the studio. He hadn’t bothered with it after his first day home, having determined that it was empty. He looked around it with new eyes now. The paint on the walls here was more exploratory, different colors muddled together.

“Father?” Hux asked, though he could see no one was there, and he kept his voice quiet so as not to wake Ben. Sighing, Hux turned the light back off. The switch clicked -- Hux knew he had heard that sound just before waking. He turned to walk back to bed and there was a horrible crash behind him.

Hux cried out, whipping back around to face an attacker. The man from the grocery store, surely. No one was there. It was only a fallen canvas, knocked over by the wind streaming through the open door in the studio. They’d always kept that door bolted shut before and there was no handle on the outside, and so Hux had nearly forgotten it was there at all. It was open now, had been left open from the inside when whoever turned on the light fled, and the wind had blown it open all the way. The wind whistled fiercely outside, though the porch roof kept out the rain. The night was black as pitch.

Hux shut the door and re-bolted it. No one could have gotten in this way, so he’d need to check the other doors and--

Hux put his back to the door, sagging there, and saw what was painted on the canvas that had fallen. It was his own face, a portrait made from his headshot like the one in the gallery, only this one was black-and-white over a blue background. He felt he might vomit looking at an image of himself deathly pale in a suit, with jarring Cadmium Red tear-tracks rolling down his cheeks from blank eyes, the painted blood shiny where the rest of the work was matte.

“What was that?” Ben asked. He stood in the doorway, looking just as spooked, no doubt jolted out of bed by the sound of the canvas falling and door banging open.

Hux swallowed roughly and then found his voice. “Check the door, t-the kitchen door. _Please_.”

Ben nodded and left, the floor creaking with his footsteps as he crossed the living room. Hux knelt and touched one of the vivid red lines on his portrait’s face, and the paint came away on his hands. Still wet. Just done. He picked up a dull paint knife from the floor and then stabbed it between the bleeding eyes of this cursed portrait. It wasn’t sharp enough to saw through canvas with, but he kept stabbing until the face of his portrait was a ruin. By the end he realized tears were rolling down his cheeks, and Ben had returned. Hux clenched his paint-stained hand into a fist, rubbing his fingertip against his palm to smudge the paint thin there, less likely to stick to everything else he touched. Once he put down the paint knife, Ben coaxed him up and out of the studio, though he couldn’t get Hux back in bed.

Hux sat in the armchair, reading.

_I feel as though I’m losing control. It’s not like a nightmare at all. It’s a sickness that’s still there with the sunrise. I think my body is being taken over by something evil. I’m turning into_

Hux let the sketchbook fall from his hands, and hated his father bitterly. He looked at Ben, obviously fatigued but still awake, looking at him in that hopeful way he had, laying on his belly in bed, his face propped on his forearm.

“The light was on in the studio,” Hux told him. “It’s why I got up. I thought he...I thought someone was in there. And the painting….” The words froze in Hux’s throat. The evidence of the wet painting was stained on his hand but still he could not bring himself to say it out loud.

“Come back to bed,” Ben said plaintively.

Hux did, and they settled in together, but Hux could not sleep. The painted figures on the wall stared at him from every direction, their dark eyes merciless.

  
  


At the end of the week, when the skies cleared -- _and oh how Hux dreaded the inevitable nightfall without cover of clouds how he dreaded it_ \-- the phone rang.

Ben accompanied Hux down to the beach, scarcely a mile from the house, where the arm had washed ashore. A single police officer waited, a form that Hux would know anywhere.

“That’s the one that came by the motel,” Ben whispered as they approached. “Jesus she looks bad.”

Hux swatted him. Ben’s deep voice tended to carry. Not that Phasma would care what Ben Solo thought of her one way or another, and she did look in need of a full night’s rest. She was pallid and had dark circles under her blue eyes.

“Phas,” said Hux, jogging up to her. “It’s been too long.”

“Sorry it couldn’t be under better circumstances, Armie,” she said, her face and voice affectionate. Phasma was perhaps the only person that Hux could stand being pitied by.

‘Armie?’ Ben mouthed at him, and Hux elbowed him away.

“There’s not much to identify,” Phasma said, walking them down to the wreckage. “I didn’t know he was a sailor.”

“He wasn’t, when I lived here.” Hux told her. The scene was little more than white shards of some small vessel smashed on the rocks of the bay, and one severed limb in a dark coat sleeve. Hux turned it over by the hand, running his fingers over the palm as sandy water swirled around him.

“It’s good to see you, and I’d love to catch up, but maybe you ought to get out of town, Armie,” said Phasma. “Weird shit’s been happening.”

Hearing someone else say it out loud felt like a balm on burnt flesh. Hux breathed out and then in deeper, taking salty air into his lungs, and stood up, leaving the arm where it lay. He thanked Phasma and let her kiss him goodbye on his cheek. Ben threw an arm around him on their way back up the beach, looking moody. Hux thought about the diary entry he’d read over breakfast.

 _If the cities of the world were destroyed tomorrow, they would all be rebuilt to look like Tatooine. I’ve never seen it, but I remember it. Tash would tell me I’ve gone senile, but I know what hides beneath the skin of towns like Tatooine. Like Salem_.

Ben’s voice roused Hux from his musings. “Are you okay?”

“I didn’t love him,” Hux said. “I didn’t even like him, and I hate him rarely now. It fades more quickly when it comes. He might be nothing to me someday. He almost was, when his letter arrived and stirred everything up again.”

They returned home. Ben fixed lunch and Hux ate one bite, and they played a card game that Ben threw a fit over, and then Ben initiated sex. Hux let him top, feeling that he couldn’t face much more than lying prone on the bed. Ben fingered him open, methodological and slow, not something Hux expected from him. When he finally pushed his cock in the sweet pressure of it made Hux moan, an instant embarrassment. Ben’s pace in this, too, was maddeningly slow, and finally Hux protested.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Ben paused, balls deep. “Fucking you.”

Hux snorted. “If you say so.”

“If it’s not good--”

“Anything else. Please.”

“I just thought--”

“You thought wrong.”

“Your dad died.”

Hux twisted around to try and shove at Ben until Ben backed up, sliding out of him. “Don’t you ever talk about him while you’re inside me,” Hux snapped, furious. “How would you like it?” Ben’s face screwed up in disgust once he considered it. “I thought so. Now fuck me properly or get lost.”

Ben rolled him over onto his back and folded him in half before Hux got another word out, angling Hux’s knees over his shoulders and lining up again. “You’re bendy,” he said, and pushed himself in to the hilt, trapping Hux beneath his weight. “God, if you could see yourself like this,” Ben kissed Hux’s neck sloppily, nipping at the tender skin.

Hux turned his face to the side, giving Ben better access and also refusing to look at him. “I didn’t say you could face me.”

“You literally said anything,” Ben chuckled, and then gave Hux the rough treatment he wanted, quick thrusts slamming into him hard enough to shake the bed, his hands gripping hard enough to bruise. Ben hit his prostate by accident once and Hux moaned loud, and then Ben shifted his angle to do it every time. Hux came first, spilling between their bellies untouched with a mortifying high-pitched whine, his face pink and grimacing, and Ben followed him, his release hot inside Hux. Hux felt his ears go even redder at the realization that he liked it.

They lay together until the light changed outside, Ben insistent on spooning Hux despite Hux’s attempts to wriggle away, one of Ben’s broad hands flat and warm over Hux’s navel. When Ben got up to piss, Hux took the opportunity to settle himself against the wall in the studio to read. He only managed three sentences before he put the sketchbook down. His father’s handwriting grew progressively worse, and the rest of the entry was illegible.

_My body temperature has dropped to eighty-five. This morning I passed blood again. It’s as if the thing taking over my body no longer needs my blood._

Ben left the restroom and called for him, and then walked the other way toward the kitchen when Hux didn’t answer. Hux let his head roll back against the wall, eyes closing, and then they flew open again when something wet dripped onto his neck.

Hux started to reach a hand up and then stopped, standing instead. He walked into the bathroom and approached the mirror, his stomach sick as if the floor had dropped out from under him, and turned his face to the side. A slick red trail dripped from his ear down to the black collar of his sweater. He cursed quietly and wet a washcloth to clean himself up, dropping the red-stained rag into the trash when he was done. He heard Ben call again and turned out the bathroom light, staying quiet, not even breathing. Hux’s gray reflection stared back at him in the gloom, its eyes black. When Ben moved past the door into the studio, Hux crept out. He couldn’t face Ben yet.

He moved into the kitchen, filling the kettle with water and putting it on the stove. The burner breathed quietly to life, and the faint blue fire was the only light Hux bothered with. While the kettle heated, he looked out the window over the sink. Beyond the clear windowpane, undistorted by rain, lay the limitless night sky. It was not clouded enough to obscure the huge full moon, edged by a strange crimson haze.

“Hux?” Hux turned to see Ben’s hulking shadow in the doorway. “What’s wrong?” Ben turned on the lights.

“Nothing,” Hux said at once, blinking away the disorientation of sudden brightness. He moved to pick up the kettle, but his hand shook and he dropped it, the crash of metal on tile making him jump back. “ _Shit_.” Hot water was all over the floor. At least he hadn’t accidentally splashed either of them--

“ _HUX!_ ” Ben grabbed him away, and Hux saw that he’d been resting his palm flat on the lit burner. Ben guided him to the sink and held his hand under the tap by his wrist.

“I didn’t feel it,” Hux said. Then, louder, more panicked, “Ben, why didn’t I feel it? I don’t feel anything.”

“I don’t know,” said Ben, but his eyes were no longer on Hux’s hand, where the flesh was pale and unscathed. They were on the moon.

“It wasn’t my father,” Hux babbled. Hearing the raw fear in Ben’s voice as he yanked Hux’s unfeeling hand from the stovetop had cracked the well where Hux stored his anxieties, and now they leaked out. “His hands were like mine. Long fingers, fine-boned. Almost feminine.”

“Beautiful,” said Ben.

Hux didn’t look at him to see whether he was looking at Hux’s hand or out the window. He didn’t want to know. “He was ashamed of them, really. He never liked the way I look. Whenever he told me I was skinny I knew a beating was coming. It was like he couldn’t help it. If he looked too close he had to bloody my lips against my teeth before he could go on with his day. He needed it like he needed a smoke with his coffee. Like I do. Phasma knew him too, and she knew that wasn’t Brendol’s hand. Why did she lie to me?”

“You’re sure it wasn’t him?”

“That hand was coarse and large!” Hux cried.

“She told you to leave. Maybe she just wanted you gone. Thought if your father turned up your business would be done here.”

“It’s too late.”

Ben turned the tap off and ran a gentle touch over Hux’s palm. “Can you feel this?”

“It doesn’t hurt. _Ben_ ,” he said sharply, and Ben met his gaze. “It’s too late for me. It’s started. Whatever those things were at the grocery store...one of them grabbed me, I don’t know...I don’t know if that did it or if it’s just being here in this godforsaken place, but--”

“That’s where you went?” Ben cried, his face twisting in anger. “I told you not to!”

“Yes, warning well received, obviously!” Hux yelled back at him, wrenching his hand out of Ben’s grasp and holding it to his own chest. “Maybe if you didn’t speak in half-stories and impossibilities I’d have given it more weight.”

“God damn it, Hux, they could’ve--”

“You think I don’t know? I heard them in the alleyways and inside a shop. _I saw them_ . I saw them standing away from the windows, and I saw them eating the meat out of the case and then they _chased_ me and the door was stuck,” Hux ranted. Ben got angrier the more Hux spoke, seething at him, breathing hard, his face going red. “And one of them almost got me and he was bleeding out his eyes, he knocked me to the floor and I had to kick him away--”

Ben turned around and punched the wall, yelling. He made a hole in the plaster. Hux stopped short, backing up until his hips hit the counter.

“God fucking…” Ben muttered, rubbing his knuckles. “I burnt the ones in the houses around here that morning just to be sure they’d leave you alone and you went and wandered right into... that’s rich. That’s really something, Hux.”

“Burnt?”

“That oil your dad’s got in cans back there burns nice. Just had to throw some on them.”

“You killed people.”

“Did they look like people to you?”

Hux didn’t answer. They hadn’t. And what did that make him, now? “Phasma. Is she…?”

“I don’t know. How should I?” Ben grouched.

“She’s my friend.”

“What do you want me to do, go and get her?”

Hux looked at Ben wordlessly.

“Oh my god, you do.” Ben coughed, irritated.

“Just check on her. Tell her to take her own advice. Please.”

Ben bit his lip, shifting his weight to his other foot. “You won’t leave the house.”

Hux bristled at his tone, not a question in the slightest. An order. But, Hux had no desire to leave. Not with night fallen and the fires going on the beach. Not yet. The idea made him shudder, thinking that the next night or the one after that some hideous urge might pull him down there to stare out at the sea, waiting. “No,” he said. “I won’t. I promise, Ben. Alright?”

Ben’s stance softened and he stepped toward Hux, hands clasping his shoulders. “You say or don’t say whatever you want, but let me say this to you now.”

Hux nodded.

“I love you. Maybe not how I should. It’s all fucked up. But it’s true, okay? It’s true.”

Hux couldn’t bring himself to say anything back. Not because he didn’t love Ben. He loved him as much as Phasma, or more. And not because he wasn’t _in_ love with Ben. Whatever weighed his heart down now was certainly the closest thing Hux had ever felt to being in love. It just seemed a joke to say it now, after laying his hand on the stove and feeling no pain. He leaned his face up and kissed Ben instead, a short and chaste kiss.

Ben left, jingling his car keys in his hand, and Hux bolted the door after him, and then shoved the table against it for good measure. He wrote a short note.

 _Leave me here to whatever fate this is. Even now that I fear I’m already dead I don’t want it to end, so just leave me_.

Hux paused, looking at his unburnt hand and considering, and then with a spike of remorse added, _I love you_. He taped the note on the window of the back door, the only door they used.

He wandered through the house then, turning on every single light, even the ones in the tower. That would be as much a warning as anything could be when Ben came back. Hux lit himself a cigarette, walking from room to room upstairs, carrying Brendol’s sketchbook with him. He would make himself read to the end soon. He glanced into his old bedroom. The furnishings were dusty. Brendol had avoided this space. Hux did too, now. He went back down the winding stairs and straight into the studio, still puffing his cigarette absently. It didn’t calm his nerves like he wanted it to.

Something dripped down his face from his left eye, and Hux knew without looking that it was blood, but he touched it anyway. His fingertip came away red just like it had from his portrait, still destroyed on the floor. He stowed himself next to the old cork board full of magazine clippings and fading photographs, bits of images that Brendol thought would serve as inspiration.

Hux took a pin out of the board and pricked his wrist with it, watching the needle point puncture flesh. He poked it all the way in once, so that the pinhead sat on his skin like he was nothing but another cork board to pin ideas to, and he never felt anything. No blood came out when he pulled the pin free, the little dark hole completely dry. He flipped open the sketchbook, turning to the next legible page.

_I cut myself today. My finger was nearly severed. I ripped it off the rest of the way and felt no pain. I’m disintegrating while I still breathe._

The pages descended into mindless scrawl after that, and Hux flipped, watching them darken with more and more hatch marks until he came to the last one. It was a rendering of the moon, finished with a Cadmium Red wash. Hux put out his cigarette on the tile floor and dropped the sketchbook, leaning his head back against the wall.

Hux opened his eyes when a shadow fell over him. “Ben?” He said as he raised his head. “I left a note, you fool man, I told you….” Hux’s breath caught in his throat. Even in the shadow of the doorway he knew the body wasn’t Ben’s. It was Brendol’s paunchy frame.

Hux sat up, huddling himself into the corner as far as he could, drawing his knees up by his chest. “Father?”

“Tash, I tried to warn you.” Brendol stepped into the light. “I gave you every grace. More than you deserve. I left a piece of my supper on the beach for you to find and you still didn’t leave. You always were useless, but you were my son too. I _tried_. You can’t say I didn’t. What happened long ago in a place far, far away from here is happening again.”

“Go away,” said Hux, standing up, crushing himself against the wall as his father walked closer. Brendol’s face was bloodless and starting to cave in on one side, rotting away. His hands were dark blue at the joints with pooled and rancid blood, one of his fingers gone just as his diary had said.

“The dark stranger came in his hooded robe years ago, when my own father would have been a young man. The fellow that spoke with me on my porch here met him, and the stranger with yellow eyes like a beast told him he knew the secrets of the galaxy that no one else did. Not how to take life, anyone can do that. How to _give_ it. The young man with the scar feared for those he loved. He wanted to keep them alive even if the universe willed it not, even if it meant taking on a dark Master. He agreed to spread the dark stranger’s religion, taking a cloak black as night onto himself. He went home, and the people in his town descended into rabid evil. Biting each other like animals. _Eating!_ His power couldn’t save the ones he cared for. Soon his wife’s eyes dripped red. She gave their twin children away to a friend yet unaffected, and he fled with them. The disciple lost everything and walked into the sea, vowing that his Master would die with him. But it was not to be. Something like that cannot be killed. It only sleeps, and when the years have gone by and the horrors become legend, it speaks again. He’ll come out of the sea anew.”

Brendol lunged, his dead hands gripping Hux’s throat, and Hux thrashed, shrieking at him. He twisted, tearing at Brendol’s hands, tearing bloodless flesh away under his nails, and then the one cutting off his breath came free from its wrist and fell with a sickening meaty thud to the floor. Hux pushed Brendol away as hard as he could, sending his father into a shelf of paint cans. Two of the cans fell and broke open, sloshing red and blue paint across the floor.

Hux lunged for a can of solvent, tearing the cap free along with two of his own fingernails, and flung the mineral spirits at his father, dousing him with the can while he lay sprawled on the floor, struggling to rise. Hux sparked his lighter and dropped it on his father’s coat. Brendol went up like a match, screaming. Not out of pain. He and Hux were the same that way now, but Brendol felt rage until the flames consumed him. Hux backed away into the living room, afraid to go too near. Afraid he would go up too, like dry straw.

There was scratching at the windows. More pallid ghouls, drawn by the lights. Hux didn’t want to die any more quickly than he already was. He retrieved a butcher knife from the block in the kitchen and locked himself in the bathroom. One of the windows smashed. He heard it. There was shuffling in the room beyond the door.

Hux gripped the knife tight until sleep took him.

  
  


Hux woke when the door rattled in its frame. The knife had slipped, the point digging into his leg through his jeans while he slept. There was no blood coming from the cut. Hux adjusted his grip on the blade. He couldn’t hide here forever.

He flung open the door and slashed the knife out. It tore through the face of the man there and shallowly down his neck, across his clavicle, and embedded itself deep in his arm, but there was no crowd of undead monsters behind the first one, and blood streamed down his face from the cut. Ben’s face, illuminated by the soft white glow of the morning sun.

Hux lost his grip on the knife, gasping. It clattered to the floor. Ben grabbed him, slamming him into the wall hard enough to make him grunt, and then released him, breathing hard. Ben staggered back and sat on the bed, holding his injured bicep. It was hard to tell the damage through his black clothing, but soon his huge hand was red just like the lower half of his face.

“Why didn’t you go,” Hux moaned from where he leaned against the wall. “Why didn’t you leave?”

“I couldn’t leave without you,” Ben said through clenched teeth, pure, transparent tears streaking through the red mess Hux had made of him, tears drawn up by fierce pain. “I saw the corpse and the broken glass, I thought they’d gotten you...I searched the house and then I realized this door was locked. I couldn’t just go.”

Hux glanced toward the smoldering heap left of his father, and saw Ben had covered it with a sheet. “It’s too late for me,” Hux said bitterly. “I told you that, you great idiot.”

He undressed Ben, and cleaned and bandaged him up, carefully washing out his cuts and winding gauze around them. At least Brendol had kept a fully-stocked medical kit. Or more likely had just known by the time he thought to use any of his supplies that it would make no difference.

“Phasma?”

“I found her at the station, but it was too late.” Ben said. “I’m sorry. They were travelling in packs like wolves, chasing down anyone still capable of screaming, of fear.”

“But not you,” Hux said. “You hid?”

“No. I didn’t need to. They see me. They look at me, but...no. I don’t know why.”

Hux did. He thought he knew very well. “Your mother has a twin. Your uncle’s her twin, the one that told you about all this horror.”

“Yes,” Ben said simply, taking Hux’s hand, holding it firmly but gently, like something precious he was afraid to let drop.

“How did you know it would happen here? Why aren’t you waiting around in Tatooine?”

“That’s scorched earth. It had to be somewhere new.”

“Who told you?” Hux demanded, his voice rising in pitch and volume.

“I dreamed it,” Ben said stubbornly, but he looked guilty.

“Was it a man with yellow eyes?”

Ben winced. “If you know that you might as well know all of it. I dreamed of you, too. I think I’d have come here just for you, if none of the rest of it were here, I’d have still come. I dreamed we were walking through a forest in the snow. Your hair was so brilliant against the white ground and the frosted trees. I fell in love with you then, before I met you here. In the dream I didn’t have to ask you what you were thinking because I knew it just by looking at you. You were thinking about all the people that are born, and die, and how the trees outlast them. And how we outlast them, together. It was so cold out. I said we should go and get in bed together to stay warm, and you gave me that look you do. The one that means you’re overthinking it so hard you can’t enjoy it until I loosen you up.” Ben tugged at Hux’s hand, and Hux let himself be pulled into bed.

“Don’t,” Hux scolded Ben when he kissed him. “You’ll bleed more.”

“It’s worth it.” Ben drew Hux’s wrist to his mouth, pushing his sleeve up to nip at the thin skin there. Well, two could play at that game.

Hux mirrored Ben’s hold on him, kissing Ben’s palm and then licking the blue-green map of veins just visible beneath the skin of his comparably thicker wrist. Ben froze, looking at him wide-eyed, and that was good. He wouldn’t dislodge the bandage on his face. Hux kissed and sucked the skin there, amused despite himself by the open astonishment on Ben’s features, as if no one had ever done this to him, the very thing he’d just been doing to Hux.

Hux kissed up his forearm and bit the skin on the inside of his elbow gently, making Ben gasp. He worked his way to his shoulder and then down his chest, swiping his tongue hot over Ben’s left nipple, pushing him down flat on his back with one hand while the other freed his cock from his underwear. It hardened quickly while Hux ran his tongue along the shadows of his clenching abdominals.

“Ticklish, Ben?”

“Fuck.” Ben jerked slightly when Hux bit his side. He reached for Hux’s hair and Hux pushed his hands away.

“Be good and you can watch. Otherwise I’ll blindfold you.”

“I’ll be good. I’ll be so good,” Ben said eagerly, laying his hands on the sheets beside his hips.

Hux wrapped a hand around Ben, stroking him once, twice. His cock was beautiful just like the rest of him. Shining precome beaded up on the head and Hux licked it. Ben throbbed. Hux looked up at his face, finding his eyes glazed and his mouth open. It was hard not to chuckle at him. The sight also went straight to Hux’s groin. Hux took Ben into his mouth and then, suppressing his gag reflex, a skill he was rather proud of, swallowed him down until his nose met Ben’s dark pubes.

“ _FUCK_ ,” Ben cried, his hands jumping up as if to bury themselves in Hux’s hair again, trembling in the air, and then returning to the sheets, clawing at them.

Hux swallowed around Ben and then drew back up slow, relishing the little choking sounds Ben made. He repeated the motions, starting slow and ramping up the pace until Ben was shaking.

“I won’t last,” Ben said. “I’m gonna come.”

 _That’s the idea_ , Hux thought, rolling his eyes. On his next upward stroke he sucked on the head of Ben’s cock and Ben shouted, collapsing back on his pillow and shuddering as he came, flooding Hux’s mouth with a taste as briny as the surf crashing below the house. Hux swallowed as delicately as he could, and shifted to lay next to Ben in bed. He was achingly hard himself, but he didn’t want to take care of it. He wanted a more restful sleep than the last one he’d had. They dozed together, and this time Hux rested his hands on Ben, giving him the contact that it would hurt him to reach for if he were left to his own devices.

  
  


Twilight fell. Figures walked the beach, stacking wood in the charred remains of past fires. Hux sat bolt upright, realizing that in the haze of injury and panic and desire neither of them had turned the lights off. Somewhere in the front of the house, glass broke.

“Ben,” Hux said, and Ben snorted, eyes shifting beneath his closed eyelids. “Ben, wake up.” Hux shook him.

“What? What?” Ben sat up, and then groaned, his hand moving to his bandages. They were stained dark red at the centers now.

“Get dressed,” Hux ordered, standing up. This was the only time in his life he’d ever been glad he slept in his clothes. He picked up the knife from the floor, crusted with Ben’s blood. “ _Hurry_.”

Ben did, jumping up and scrounging around for pants, groaning a bit louder when the movement pained him. There was scuttling movement in the hall, a shadow at the end of it peering around the corner. Hux gripped the knife.

In the next instant a woman in a black church dress came sprinting at him, her face streaked with blood and frozen in a vacant expression. Hux slashed at her, the knife cutting her face like butter, leaving it in dry and hanging ribbons. Her hands clawed at him, raking his forearms. He threw her off. Another window smashed in the kitchen, and then right behind him. He turned in time to see the ghoul ignore Ben and sprint for him, and to see Ben tackle the man.

“We can’t stay here,” Hux grunted, fending off the feral woman’s second attack. The knife caught in her ribs and wouldn’t come loose after he twisted it. The third intruder approached from the kitchen, and then two more behind it. More shadows danced in the entryway.

“Yeah. Okay.” Ben threw aside the man he’d intercepted, flinging him against the wall like a life-sized plastic doll. “Come on.” He took Hux’s arm and dragged him into the studio, pallid figures in finery approaching them like stalking predators.

Ben unbolted and threw open the side door there, the one that Brendol -- for it must have been Brendol -- had left through all those nights ago. It seemed an age. Together they fled the house and the porch, sprinting out onto the sand.

They ran along the beach together in the fading light, Ben pulling Hux along so hard by his waist that Hux was almost afraid he would start coming to pieces like his father had. They ran until there was nothing on their left but steep short cliffs bristling with dark trees, nothing on their right but the roar of the sea.

When they finally stopped Hux let himself collapse against a large stone. Ben stood, hands on his knees, breathing hard. Hux realized he wasn’t out of breath, and couldn’t remember when he’d last inhaled. He did it now, breathing in the scent of sea salt and pine.

“We must have left Salem by now,” Ben said, and then looked up, his face hardening back into grim resignation. He stood, squaring up, shifting his weight. Deciding whether to run again, or fight. Hux scrambled to his feet. There was no need to swoon like he had. He wasn’t tired, any more than he was cold or hurt. Those things didn’t exist for him now. Ben could not be allowed to fight on his behalf. Hux looked up at where Ben’s eyes were trained and saw the first of them emerge from the trees above on the oceanside cliffs. A face that had once been umber, gone grayish from blood loss. Red still dripped from its eyes and nose.

More figures appeared, climbing down to the beach as they did every night. Some carried logs or kerosene, ready to build the pyres and wait. Wait staring out into the water for their dark lord to return.

“Come on,” Ben grunted, pulling Hux abruptly by his arm out into the waves. Water sloshed around their ankles. Hux felt it reach his knees and then his crotch. It was slowing him down physically, but he couldn’t feel the cold of it, and it must be freezing.

“Ben,” he said, trying to pull back against Ben’s grip and being dragged along anyway. Ben was even stronger than he looked, and he looked like a bodybuilder. “Ben, wait. We can’t.” _He’s here, this is where he’ll come from, it’s why they wait_.

“There’s nowhere else. Come on, we’ll keep walking in the water. I haven’t seen one of them take a dive yet.”

The water was up to their chests. The next wave hit Hux in the face, dousing his hair. When he surfaced, he saw Ben soaked too. Soaked and shivering.

“No,” Hux moaned desperately. “No, go back. You can’t do this. They’ll leave you alone--”

“I’m not leaving you.”

The people on the beach watched them struggle, blank eyes observing with all the pity a steel trap has for a bleeding animal. Ben pulled him out further, his hand a vice beneath the black water. The moon hung overhead, a ruby lit from within. Hux’s feet no longer touched the sea floor. He paddled, sometimes going under when the waves battered him, but his lungs did not cry out. He had no need for air, except to speak. He drew in a breath when he was able.

“Ben, stop.”

Ben paid no heed, though he was struggling to stay afloat with his hurt arm. Hux tried to imagine the feeling of salt water in wounds like the ones he’d given Ben, and could not. Even the memory of pain was fading.

The fires on the shore roared to life, illuminating the shadows standing perfectly still around them. Hux turned back, looking at them. The line of flickering orange spots continued as far as he could see down the coast in each direction, the furthest of them no more than a pinprick through dark fabric held up to the sun. Another wave jostled them, and Ben’s hand slipped from his. Hux turned in the water, paddling at it with hands that no longer pruned up, looking for Ben, and saw nothing but open water.

“Ben?” He called, continually rotating himself, caught in a whirlpool of panic. “Ben? _BEN?!_ ” He dove under, but could not see anything below. The water was impenetrable in the dark. Hux swam down until his hands met thick, sucking sand at the bottom and he felt for a body in the void, but found nothing. Sharp stones cut his hands and he felt nothing. He surfaced again, screaming Ben’s name until it didn’t sound like a name to his own ears.

  
  


Something about this latest sketch wasn’t quite right. The nose, maybe. Yes, it should be bigger. Hux erased the faint line he’d just made and drew it in again, determined to get it right. He must never forget a single detail of this face. He hadn’t drowned like Ben. He didn’t think he was capable of it.

“Happy Halloween,” said Rose. She was his favorite nurse, he her least favorite patient. He was sure of that. “Do you want to come inside?”

“No, I’ll sit here awhile longer, if you’d be so kind, Miss Tico.”

Rose pursed her lips, considering it. Hux had behaved himself extraordinarily in the past week. She made her decision and smiled at him. “Okay. I’ll be back around in an hour and we’ll go in then.”

Hux thanked her. He added hatch-marks to his drawing, shading in a pattern that he hadn’t seen Ben’s face under in reality. The dappled shade of leaves, like the spot he sat now. Time in the yard was valuable. The air was worlds better outside even in the heart of Boston than it was within the hospital. It was stale there, chemical with something foul underneath. And sitting in the sun was a blessing. A quite literal one -- it had been bestowed upon him.

Even in his grief Hux had known he could not stay in the sea forever. He returned to the beach to meet his fate there. The waiting dead took his hand just as Ben had, the ones slower to reach him laying their hands on his shoulders instead, and they walked him back down the way he and Ben had come, past the beacons they’d built to herald the end. They walked him all the way back to his father’s house and without speaking, putting their whispering voices straight into his mind, bade him dress himself in white.

Hux did, taking halting steps into the house and pulling the only white thing he had onto his body. His robe. He returned to the beach and stood with the others, waiting. They wore black or navy, but Hux did not feel out of place. The color of the moon deepened, though Hux hardly thought it possible. It was maroon now, the dark coursing color of a cut throat.

Eventually Hux could see something in the water, scarcely distinguishable at first in the gloom. As it drew nearer he knew his heart should be pounding. It would be, were it not dead in his chest. Ben emerged from the waves, his body cloaked in black. He approached the pyre where Hux waited, and Hux saw that the wound across Ben’s face was long-healed into a pink scar. Knitted together again. Fixed. Hux smiled at him.

“Ben--”

“No. Not anymore.”

It was Kylo Ren who took Hux in his arms and kissed him by the light of the beacon that night. Kylo, servant of the dark. By his leave Hux walked the day, though he did so with a story that condemned him.

“I’ll come for you when my work here is done,” Kylo had said.

Hux returned to Boston, and when he arrived at the firm still in his white robe and vomited up the entire tale when his partners gaped at him, they had him committed. The world jerked toward hell, the change invisible to people consumed with the minutiae of lives that soon would run their course. During the day Hux sat in the sun and waited, and sketched pictures of the man he loved. Most nights he slept and dreamed, the people in the rooms next to his dying slowly while he went on unchanged, transmuted from the baser self into something shining and sharp. Tonight he would not sleep. Smiling to himself, a smile which made the observing nurses at the edge of the yard shiver and turn away, Hux lovingly added Kylo’s scar to the drawing cradled in his pale hands.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m back on my bullshit! By which I mean writing in a time period before I was born without doing my fuckin research. Avoided technology this time around (until someone finds what I missed lol).
> 
> It’s Horror Movie AU day and I picked one of my absolute favorites: Messiah of Evil. I wouldn’t recommend paying money to watch it, it’s an objectively Bad film. However, the 70’s art film imagery is great and the grocery store scene will change your life. As of right now it’s included on Amazon Prime Video if you want to check it out. Come back and let me know if you watch the movie!
> 
> Messiah of Evil provides the perfect source material for Kylo to finally finish what Anakin started. You would assume that a psychiatric hospital might take their patients’ pulses occasionally, so it’s up to you whether Kylo somehow restored Hux or put a glamour on him, or whether Hux’s brain has truly cracked in two and he made it all up. Poor guy. If the end of the world really is happening and Kylo leads an army west, I think Kylo and Hux will both figure out that Hux is quite the strategist.


End file.
